Musings on "The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying"

Upon reading Joe Martino's article "The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying", I've had the following thoughts.

The most common regret was "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me". I have to ask myself - what do I want? What is "true" to me? And what exactly do others expect?
I want some bit of adventure. Maybe this is just me being young and male; it seems stereotypical of my demographic. But I dream of road trips, sailing ships, and broadening my horizons. I want to enjoy an ease of living, too; to spend my time doing things for myself rather than an employer or other. I want to have a garden and live on a sailboat. I want to have a pretty and happy wife and to have kids.
Others expect me to provide for them, particularly the wife and children. Still others expect me to do well professionally, like my parents. Still others, as a recent meeting with a group of old friends proved, expect me to have a career in public garden curation. I want all of these things to various degrees, but each people group has a unique goal for me to work toward.

Second most common, and coming entirely from men (however that statistic worked, I don't know, but I suspect the sample examined was predominantly male), was "I wish I hadn't worked so hard".
How can I avoid this? Do what comes naturally, I suppose. But really, how can I work so that I don't miss out on family life? My assumption is that I will need to work, and though I've questioned that assumption thoroughly, it seems to hold true. I could work from home, bring my children to work, work 40 hours or less, or work hard to retire or semi-retire early.
Working from home would be great, but what work can be done from home? Anything I'm interested in? I could be an estate gardener, or an employee of a business which had on-grounds housing. It would seem that the ideal would be to work at Longwood Gardens, live on property, and homeschool children. In this way, I'd constantly be around my family, my children would have the run of the place(hopefully they'd like plants), and life would be neatly organized around work and family.
Bringing children to work is an idea; I could be an entrepreneur and bring my children to jobsites. They'd be with me all day, learn from my work how to work, and enjoy the community around them. They'd learn social and job skills, though they wouldn't be around children their age much at all. This is important, I think, and deserves more research.
I could work part time, but this would limit my options to highly-paid positions and/or extreme frugality. I'm on board for both, so no problem there.
I could, lastly, work and save to travel frugally with family, driving around and/or sailing around, racking up a lifetime of family experiences I wouldn't, hopefully, regret. There's risk to this, and little stability, but what adventure! What worldly children, too! It'd be a great way for children to learn.

The third most common regret was not expressing personal feelings. I'm usually good about this, it's just that I don't have too many cares currently, and therefore don't feel strongly about many things. Giving a damn is hard when you care so little about so little, but it's a great stress-reliever. I used to read the newspaper, follow politics, and attempt to be a good christian republican. Now that that awful pox of a phase is over, I can rest without fear or hate. Choosing to be a teapot agnostic with my head in the sand was the best investment I've ever made in my happiness.

Fourth most common was the regret of losing touch with friends. This is a fault of mine. I don't invest too much in friendships nor do I create too many. I don't usually run in circles of people with common values, and I derive "no satisfaction from shallow encounters based on values that are not my own". To be honest, I don't enjoy most people's company because I judge their passions and pursuits to be worthless. Take, for instance, an acquaintance of mine who was/is into reality shows. I've never had a conversation with her which did not revolve around celebrity gossip or television shows, and I've also never enjoyed a conversation with her enough to want to see her again. This is really back to question one, living a life true to myself - I can't spend my life in boredom.

The fifth most common regret was "I wish that I had let myself be happier". I've consiously worked towards this for years, using mainly the method of faulty memory. I can't remember things I don't focus on, and I try to focus on things I like. Therefore, it takes a current event and a friend's reminder of past injuries to jog my memory of a person's past wrongs. This rarely makes me a happy person; rather it makes me an angry person. A grudge is too stressful to be worth anything, I need to think positively and enjoy being stress-free. I need to forget more in life than to remember, and to plan more happiness than avoidance of unhappiness. I'm ok with being happily amnesic, but I'd rather major on the "happy" and minor on the "amnesic".

There you have it, hundreds of words which shall remain in the closet of internet obscurity. I aim to gain all the advantages of being a Niemann; from nothing and into it. However, if this closet prose has filled your time, please let me know; it's nice to know somebody's out there. Oh - and "Hi" Scott! I hope your intestines are feeling better!

A Passing Glimpse

By Robert Frost

I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--

Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.

Obstacle 1: Happiness Negation

Centuries-old cultural conditioning has given us a nasty neurosis: the belief that happiness must be "earned". It can be "earned" only by enduring unpleasantness (eg work, pain, misery). But how do you know if you've endured enough unpleasantness to deserve happiness? Another unspoken game rule: "responsible adults" can never endure enough unpleasantness to truly deserve happiness.

Laid on top of the first neurosis is the idea that spending money will make you happy. This is toffee coating on a bad puritan apple. If you spend enough money to give you the (advertised) conditions for happiness, the neurosis emerges in the form of apparently random worries, guilt, "feeling shitty", etc. Worrying is the easiest and most popular way to negate happiness. (See sidebar interlude).

So: we never stop working, we never stop spending money, we're never really happy – ideal conditions, coincidentally, for a certain type of slave economy.

from http://www.anxietyculture.com/worry.htm

Will Hates

Posted recently, rebutted tonight, courtesy Scott Willis, my brother. Had to share. 

Joshua Willis

Hmm... The older generation speaking down to the younger generation, for a litany of more popular than real faults. Surely this has never happened before.

Scott Willis 

‎1 Why shouldn't life be fair? Currently it is not, but should we accept that and admit defeat? 2 Self esteem is the only thing that will protect your mental stability. 3 I made that at 19, why shouldn't others go for it? 4 I hardly ever see my boss, Tough? No. 5 Flipping burgers earns you what opportunity exactly? 6 Yeah sure, an individual act is not the fault of the parents on a legal basis, but our parents are a major factor in who we become. There is a certain type of liability in that. 7 People don't become boring because of bills, but because of lost vision and drive, a surrender to failure if you will. 8 Real life? Grades? When have the two been correlated? And what school is this? can I attend? I know of no such institution post-preschool. 9 Depends on what career you choose. Also, a sense of self and purpose is never to be underestimated, whether in a work setting, or outside it. 10 Sure, but I go to a coffee shop on my days off, so do the people on TV, but for them it also happens to be their job. Who really thinks this anyway? How many teenagers do you know think that they will not have to work?

Putting down people when they are at their most vulnerable, and least capable of defending themselves (ie: children/teenagers) is not helpful. Did it help you? I want to see an end to the whining about the oncoming generation. It is a recurrent theme that has had what effect exactly? Yeah, your generation is definitely more original than the one that came before... Whining never changed anything, or hasn't life taught you that yet? Life teaches difficult lessons by experience, not asinine lists. If young people have an idea of the way the world should be, they will make it so, or not. The problem is that to those kids for whom this input would actually be helpful, it is useless. For those who it would help, they already know. The scorn of our forebears when made a generality is destructive and unappreciated, it accomplishes what exactly?

Putting Bill Gates in the pic tells us that we can achieve a higher level of success than is realistic, while telling us on the chalkboard that we suck. Is that really a fair comparison? The reality is that it takes all kinds to make the world go round. Scorn, no matter who it is aimed at, is not a helpful attitude. Derision is merely one group of people belittling another. Are you really one of those? I refuse to be.

My generation outnumbers yours 2-1. What do you think we will tell YOU when you're old and expect us to pay for your medical care and social security if what you give us now is negativity? I'm pretty sure we'll be sympathetic... Trust us... After all, for the majority of Americans from your generation, there is no other choice. You're not good financial planners as a whole.

US Military bases in the Middle East

Notice anything? Perhaps a cluster? No one need be surprised if Iran is the next on the list. How the history books will scorn the US.

Plant Breeding Lab

I'm currently at my plant breeding job. I've spent the morning learning how to extract DNA and use the various lab tools involved, it's been fun. And easy. Working in a lab is mostly cerebral and minimally physical. It's a good way to spend a morning, almost like spending it organizing papers or whatnot. And, there's downtime. I've a half-hour break, essentially, and am 9 minutes away from working again. What an easy job! I hope I learn a lot about breeding. I'm going to have to start reading their plant breeding texts during downtime.

Hammer, By Fabio Morabito

I should have posted this long ago. It's eloquent and profound, and will change your thoughts on hammers as well as on life.

A hammer is at once the easiest of our tools and the most profound. No other tool fills the hand as much as a hammer does; none inspires the same degree of dedication to the job and such a total acceptance of the task. With hammer in hand, our body acquires its proper tension, a classic tension. Every statue ought to have a hammer, visible or invisible, like a second heart or a counterweight to offset the weight of the limbs. Wielding a hammer, we get rounded out, more integrated; it is exactly the one extra thing we need to feel ourselves permanent. Grabbed by the hand, obtuse, cyclopean, childlike with its weight and its feel, it gives us once again that sensation of freshness in a tool, a satisfying extension to our bodies, of an effort directed without waste or frustration. O first rate hammer! Willing brother! Few things are straightforward as you!

It acts like and epic poem; it’s bilious, goatish and eagle like. The force of a juicy anger has been attached to a wooden handle and has been left to ferment and toughen there. That’s the way we get hammers- from a slow drip-drip of rage, which finally forms a scab at the end of the handle, an amalgam of wrath. Just shape that and polish it, and your hammer is ready to go.

Passivity and power co-exist in a hammer. In fact, a hammer works by surprise, by nasty surprise, and its bruising strength is indebted not so much to its force as to its laconic delivery. It doesn’t affirm; it skewers. All of a hammer’s rage, slowly absorbed by the handle, slowly fermented, slowly assimilated, is expressed in one sharp bang! There’s no time for anything else. A man who hammers, it would seem, combines in the hammer head the best of himself and his forefathers. The man himself, as a particular individual, is symbolized by the handle, which determines the willingness and direction of the blow, but the impact itself is entirely indebted to his past, a past heavy with the weight of the dead. A horde of dead are packed into every hammer blow, your own dead, all that has been distilled in times before yours, everything tough that preceded you, and it’s that toughness you hammer with, along with all your dead kin, whose purpose is to serve the living as a final hardness, as their sharpened steel, their armor plating. Anyone who tries to live without the dead, without a family tree, is barely alive and won’t last long.

Thus a hammer never says anything that hasn’t been said before; no novel emotion ever changes its tone. The dead always produce the same response. Their productions get weaker with the passing of time, vast areas of memory crumble away, and their vocabulary gets smaller until at last it is reduced to a single syllable, hard and obdurate.

Upon reaching the kingdom of the dead, every dead person loses definition and his faltering voice is erased by the voices of others. Every hammer blow is like that, flowing lava of voices that has been reduced to one sole syllable. Every hammer blow raises to the surface our lowest depths, which are often close to a petrified inertia, their connections with here-and-now shrunk to a few dreams, a few pangs of conscience, a few blows from a hammer. That’s why the hammer blows of one man are vastly different from those of another; they glue together parts that are peculiar to the individual, matters that defy translation. Maybe at some point, in the farthest distance, they do touch each other and mingle, but even so they retain their separateness. Only the most sensitive of instruments could sort out those crude banging’s into all their strata of voices that have been lost in the passage of time. But it would be a hellish instrument. We’d hear the warm of our dead speaking one by one, in a terrifying whirlwind of sound.

We have to bring the dead together and confuse them, to stop them frightening us, so that they’ll let us live. We have to amalgamate them, squash them together, rub out their features and voices, until they linger on only as a choir, a far-distant clay pit, a half shadow. That’s the reason behind the invention of the hammer, its unified force. With a single blow it binds us to our dead and at the same time plunges them deep into the past. It buries them, gets them out from under our feet. When we talk to the dead through a hammer, we liberate ourselves from them. We can then go forward. The hammer flattens out, opens up a pathway, crushes down bumps in the road, levels off the track, heads toward tomorrow. A hammer is a prow, no more no less. But like every prow, it leaves behind a large wake, a choir of voices that are out dead kin, re-echoing in every blow. To move ahead is to move toward the dead. In every blow those who went before and those who are coming after, our yesterdays and our tomorrows, our liberty and our origins touch each other and fuse. In every blow we are nailed to the earth, redefined in a burst of bright flame, as if we were statues, not wholly alive, not wholly here, mildly classic and forever.